About Me

This journal -- the antecedent to the blog -- gets its start from a
decision to dig up all the grass in our yard and plant flowers,
perennials, ground cover, shrubs, a small tree or two, berry bushes,
vegetables. My first title for it, I remember now, was "The Amateur." I
am fond of the word's Latin roots -- it means "lover." I'm not trained,
I'm not a professional, I just began digging things up and planting. To
be an amateur means to do something not for money, but for love. Five
summers later, I am still an amateur, but the place has blossomed. I
loved the development stage; now I'm working on management, maintenance
-- skills that require patience. I like doing things, trying things, and
seeing what happens. I experiment, I learn from experience (or try to).
I love to see things growing. I love the idea that when we step
outdoors, we are in nature. The "environment" begins at the doorstep.
Open the door; breathe the air; listen. Today a cardinal sat on the head
of a sunflower, bobbing and calling, looking for all the world as if he
had just lost something. I noticed he ate a few sunflower seeds too.
There is always something to see.Here's the "interests" list:

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Boston Harbor Islands: First Explore the Schedule

Why is it
so much fun to look at the water? The great pleasure in taking a Boston Harbor Islands ferry
from island to island is watching the world you're ordinarily part of it (and
think you "know") go by from the point of view of the water. It looks
different from out here.

Then
there's the lure of just watching the water. Does some part of us still long for those long-ago millennia of fins and gills and trying not to end up as Gollum's dinner?

Departing
from the Hingham Shipyard, the ferry sticks to the channel while we scan the
horizon from a narrow bench on the sunny side of the deck. Checking out the shiny new
commercial buildings on the redeveloped shipyard, the in and out rhythm of
the shoreline as a headland retreats and reveals a few sunbathers on a
driveway-sized beach; then a vertical extrusion of graying cement towers looking
dated and tired. And then we started running into the shoreline profiles of lesser known lands that were
islands or peninsulas and trying to figure which was which.

The high
point came when I recognized that the long, skinny peninsula finger-pointing into the harbor while it snuck up on us from the other
side of the ferry was Hull. This extremity is called Pemberton Point, where a
wind turbine rises beside the high school. I've been there! And when you look
across the water from there -- a historically important shipping channel,
the 'south' route into Boston harbor, called the "Hull Gut" -- what you
see is the landing pier at Peddock's Island. And that's where we are now!
looking back at Hull. As I said, things look different from water.

Peddocks
Island, however, is better in theory than in fact. None of the buildings surviving from
its World War II military base are open. The so-called "fort"
is missing some of the basic attributes of a fort, such as walls. And whoever
is running the harbor islands these days (the National Park Service, actually) doesn't
have a decent map of the place to offer visitors. What the Park Service insists
on calling "Fort" Andrews was in fact a military base at the start of World
War II. The military built what appear to be very decent quarters for NCOs, and there
are signs pointing out where a few guns (mortars) intended to protect the
harbor used to be, but aren't there any more.

The base became a prison camp for Italian soldiers captured in North Africa, and everybody posted
there ended up having a good time sharing spaghetti and tomato sauce dinners
because the Italians knew how to grow a garden.

Since there
wasn't that much to explore on Peddocks, we started to look at the ferry
schedule to figure out our options. We had already passed on the Quincy ferry
service since the the departure/arrival times weren't convenient for our Sunday
afternoon start schedule. That decision brought us to the Hingham Shipyard "blue" line.

We had left
Hingham a few minutes after 1 p.m. Now as hard as we studied the "multi-island
adventure summer ferry schedule" presented us, we could find only two possible
return times, 3:55 p.m.or 6:15 p.m. No middle way between these poles. To get
back to Hingham at 3:55 p.m. we would have to board a 3 p.m. ferry at the Peddocks
dock. That boat would then turn a two-stop "adventure" voyage that
took 20 minutes on the way out into a 55-minute return trip. It's funny how
time seems to disappear over water. Maybe it's because the weather was perfect
for a boat ride -- sunny, dry, low 80s -- but disappear it did.

Our other
choice was to leave Peddocks at 4:35 and spend almost twice as much time, an hour and forty minutes, while
touching the landing dock of every harbor island on the way back.

I forced my sun-struck, spaced-out brain to try to make sense of this magical disappearing act of
time. If you get on the 4:35 ferry -- omitting the question of how to spend another hour and a half on already-explored Peddocks -- the ferry would take you to Georges Island at 4:55 (where visitors can explore an actual Civil
War era fort, but now there was no time), then to Lovells Island at 5:05; then
-- looping back -- back to Georges Island again (so actually you could have
a jolly 10 minutes there) at 5:15.Then onto Hull at 5:35 -- Hull? Hull's not even an
island! -- then back again to Peddocks at 5:45 p.m. (rescuing the last few
adventurers tearing their hair in tedium); then back at last to Hingham at 6:15
p.m., somehow having stretched that 20-minute direct cruise into a 1 hour and
40-minute circumnavigation of the wonders of a modest slice of Boston
Harbor.

But the
thing is, just watching the water and the retreating landscape -- there goes
Worlds End! Again! -- really was, well, the high point of the day. Or have I
said that already?